Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#580 Has Divine Providence offered Americans another chance? "My Sister, My Bride" (Song of Songs), and the Transformative Power of Love
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In the aftermath of Donald Trump's inauguration we navigate the complex debates surrounding gender identity and the Supreme Court's role, advocating for a courageous proclamation of the gospel amid societal discord.
Diving deeply into the sacredness of marriage and family, recognizing them as the bedrock of society. Battling against the challenges posed by a pornographic culture and distorted views of masculinity, we introduce the Claymore initiative—a call to young men to embrace authentic masculinity aligned with the teachings of Theology of the Body. Through the poetic lens of the Song of Songs, we celebrate the awe-inspiring mystery of femininity and masculinity, emphasizing a purity of heart that shields us from societal misperceptions.
Reference: Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body, #109
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Welcome to Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Rigg, your host. Hey, thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 1:St Catherine of Siena said that if you become who you are, that you would literally set the world on fire. And St Athanasius, an early church father and a doctor of the church, said the son of God became man so that we might become God. You know I make a wild guess at this, but I bet you, most of us, are a bit disconnected from this divine life that these saints are pointing us to. Yet Saint John Paul II said there's an echo of the story of this divine life that we're created for, inscribed in each human heart, in your human heart, and if you put on the proper lens if I put on the proper lens we can get in touch with this echo within us in such a way that we have that aha moment.
Speaker 1:See, that's the genus of St John Paul II's theology of the body. It connects our lived experience of life to the gospel in such a way that our life takes on a whole new meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today meaning and helps us answer those big questions that our whole culture is so confused about today. Who am I? What's my purpose? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness here on earth? How do I find love that satisfies forever? Hey, glad you're with me, I'll be. I'm excited to be with my good friend, linda Piper, from Pennsylvania, where we are in a deep freeze all the way here from Chicago, all the way to Linda in Pennsylvania, so you're about two degrees, linda.
Speaker 2:About two degrees. It's cold. We had seven inches of snow on Sunday.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Wow, so now we didn't have the snow. We had seven inches of snow on Sunday.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, wow.
Speaker 1:So now we didn't have the snow. We've got the cold but no snow. So I was at Mass this morning. It was negative three in my car, so we got you beat by a few degrees but no snow. Yeah, or very little, Very little.
Speaker 2:We have a long way to go, though, Jack. Back in 81, we had 25 below in Chicago and 80 below wind chills. I remember that.
Speaker 1:Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. Well, you know the 21st, so we've got about six more weeks and we're going to get out of this winter thing. Huh, and. I'll be looking forward to that I'm not a winter person anymore. I was okay with that at one time, but not so much anymore. I like the warmth a little bit better.
Speaker 2:So you must be getting older I don't.
Speaker 1:I don't think age has anything to do with it, linda, we're looking at the song of songs again. Uh, number 109, recorded on may 30th. So nice and warm 1984, but the big thing that just happened. So we're recording this on the 21st of January, so this is the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, so this is a very exciting time. The tyrants of the world were really pushing down on us. I don't think we deserve to have another chance, but I think divine providence, divine mercy, has given us another chance, and I think we have to take this seriously, linda, and step up to the plate, because here's what I'm afraid. I'd like to get your thoughts on this. Here's what I'm afraid. Trump is going to be doing a lot of work here, but he can't do it alone. We all have to all rise up and support him, which is a good thing, and hopefully we don't forget this three, four, five months from now.
Speaker 1:You know it wasn't long ago. My wife just reminded me where, you know, at football games and stuff, we weren't saying the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the National Anthem. I should say and my dad really brought that up he would ask every time a football game started or any game. He would say, hey, did they do the national anthem? And they didn't. Or if they did, it wasn't televised. It was really nefarious what was going on, you know, we had, we were afraid to speak out against trans stuff. Right, they were actually, you know, taking and giving our kids puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, manipulating and and mutilating I should say their bodies and and we couldn't say anything. You know, we have a supreme court justice. I always forget her name, but something kanji or kananji or whatever her name jackson brown tanji, I think Jackson Brown Tanji.
Speaker 1:I think Tanji yeah, brown, jackson or Jackson, whatever it is, and she can't define a woman and she's on the Supreme Court. Now, right, she's a Supreme Court justice. This is scary stuff. And so they were set. Biden, of course, appointed her. Is she a DEI appointed? I don't know. Right, I probably don't want to go there right now. But if you can't define a woman and you're on the Supreme Court not that they're all perfect up there, but you find out over time, don't you, linda? With the Roe v Wade stuff and the contraceptive stuff and the abortion things and the marriage, you find out that they're not perfect people there, and so we have to all stand up. The reason I bring it up is we have to stand up. We have to. You know this is part of John Paul's teaching, church teaching to come into the political square and not be afraid not be afraid to proclaim the gospel.
Speaker 1:You know, do it in love. Love people in the truth.
Speaker 1:We have to love this Supreme Court justice, whether she can define as a woman or not. We have to love this Supreme Court justice, whether she can define as a woman or not. We have to pray for her and when we do that, we kind of release the anxiety and the anger. And still we're called to love people, even though what they're doing and what they did do with the injustices of January 6th people that are finally being released, what they did to Trump and all these different things, how they shut us down our free speech, et cetera, et cetera. So, anyways, all of these things I bring up Linda, so we don't forget that while we're talking about these things on theology of the body and all that, this is the interior heart we're going to be talking about today. Interior heart we're going to be talking about today, but of course, that's to go out and to fall into love and bring families into the world and build a civilization of love.
Speaker 1:Well, you can't build a civilization of love very well when the government is pressing down and their oppressors and tyrants and totalitarians. And they will. They will If the American people don't stand up. This is what always happens. It happens around the world, it's happened throughout history. The only thing that's different about the United States is we flipped that whole thing on its head and said, no, we the people, but we were unified under God and one nation under God. And you think, well, we don't need God, We'll throw that out.
Speaker 1:And you saw what happened the tyrants came right back in, because the tyrants, the totalitarian system, is also always atheist. They always want to separate everybody and all the relationships so that the state takes power and the state becomes God, God out state in. We're always worshiping something, aren't we Linda?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a mouthful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know, it's so true. There's so many important elements of what you said, going all the way back to the beginning with your dad. They tried to make patriotism seem wrong, bad ugly all those things you see. And we have a duty to be patriotic. You can find it in the church, teaching and social justice. Yes, we do.
Speaker 1:The MAGA movement.
Speaker 2:that was what it was right Patriot yes that's what it was, but it's deeper than that. That's just a part of it, because what it is is calling our country back to be one nation under God, without the under God part. Forget it. We have what we've been through.
Speaker 1:And that's a great point, and that MAGA movement was always a Christian movement. I mean everybody that I know, that's in there and I know a lot. They always start with prayer, always start with prayer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not perfect people by any means, jack, and you know we'll all admit to that, because you know you can have the right goal, but you know we can't do evil to bring about good, and we always have to keep that in the back of our mind. But you said, too, we have the duty to stand up and bring it to the forefront, bring the gospel out, and we have an opportunity to do that now. But we need to be formed in the truth to be able to do that. We're bringing the truth out, and so there's so many elements of it.
Speaker 2:And my final thought on your opening statements was that, if we recall how Pope St John Paul said that, we're in that final confrontation, you know, between the gospel and the anti-gospel, and we want a battle here, right, we now have this opportunity to advance the gospel, but we can't let our guard down and we have to continue our own formation and understanding in the truth. And why I'm so excited about our whole podcast series is that's what this is really all about Seeing God's vision, the truth of our humanity, the truth of male and female as it pertains to how we're supposed to live. So it's a very exciting time to really get on board and, you know, learn this and live it.
Speaker 1:Yes, and what you said at the end there, this is really. You know, when you said you know, basically, spousal love, right, a man and a woman forming families. You know, this is the essence. The cell of all civilization is marriage and the family. This is it, this is the foundational cell. You can say anything you want.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to define a woman, I don't know this, I don't know that. But at the end of the day, if you take out marriage and the family, you're going to have chaos. That's just the reality. First of all, we wouldn't have children, but then, when we do have children, they're not formed in the truth. And this is what you're seeing all over the place. You're seeing young people that are not formed in the truth. So this is an exciting time to share with those young people too, because young people are starting to wake up. Now I think the evil got to the point where they're saying okay, what is this? Especially, we're meeting a lot of young men in their, let's say, their early twenties, maybe even late teens, early twenties, up into their thirties, that are looking for some direction. So we have a new, we have a new initiative coming out called the Claymore. Actually, there's a Claymore sword behind me, that big sword.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can see it very well. But that's our new initiative and that's based on the Claymore sword from William Wallace had that in Braveheart. The Scots were invaded, of course, by the tyrants. Britain was taken over and they didn't have horses. The Scots, the British, brought over horses. So that big Claymore sword was a two-handed sword, very heavy, very big, and it could take out a horse's leg, as gruesome as that sounds, but that's what they would do on the battle. They could take out a horse's leg and bring the cavalry down and make them incapable and have to fight on the ground. So it was amazing.
Speaker 1:So we're going to have that as our as as our initiative. It's the claymore sword is going to be the big insignia and it's going to say milites christi underneath it. Milites christi are. It means soldiers of christ, and and that's the battle huh fought first of all in the battle of the heart, and and then we go out into the world. So this gets us into this awe and wonder of songs, linda, the beauty and power of this, and this is what young men really need to hear, because this pornographic culture has distorted this image. So this is very important today the song of songs and opening up to the awe and wonder of femininity and masculinity opening up to the awe and wonder of femininity and masculinity.
Speaker 2:Yes, what the Song of Song actually teaches us, says the Pope, is to love, human love with the vision of God and I love what you're doing there in that endeavor because I think our young men, the whole pornography culture has become a dead end and they see it, but also this toxic masculinity that has been so shoved down their throats.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's a great point.
Speaker 2:Well, what is non-toxic masculinity? You know, and we have it right here in Theology of the Body, the true masculinity, and we're discovering it and it's a. You know, it's a wonderful thing and that human love is created and blessed by God and we need to look at it from his vision. And you know, throughout TOB, the Pope stresses also that it's the purity of heart that protects us from that distortion. We admit to concupiscence and we admit to that pull to distort all of this in the ways of the world, but that purity of heart is going to be that protection and I think that's what young men and women are searching for too. How do I find and achieve and live that purity of heart? You?
Speaker 2:have to read the Song of Songs with a purity of heart.
Speaker 1:Well, the Song of Songs actually brings it out.
Speaker 1:It's amazing that both the femininity of the bride and the masculinity. Talk about masculinity of the bridegroom. Speak without words. The language of the body is a language without words. You know, you think about this, you know when and this is so important for young men and women to hear when a man goes out and John Paul expresses this very well he's more visual and he sees the body and he's attracted to the body of you know who will be the bride? Huh, so these are two people wooing each other in the Song of Songs, erotic love poetry in the middle of the Bible. It's fascinating. It really gives some substance to Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, where, for economy of words really, and Genesis 1 and 2 expresses this beauty of love in just a few paragraphs, really certainly a few pages. And now we have the song of songs which is expressing in in bodily form.
Speaker 1:And then he, the bridegroom and the bride tried to put words on that attraction, right. So a man let me finish that my thought here before I I forget about it he sees with his eyes, the eyes of the body and he sees her attractiveness and he's moved to that into her orbit, she, and this is reality today. We think this was so long ago, but this is reality today. A woman is much more an emotional, an affection, an emotional, and so she reacts to that, to that movement by a man, and she goes ooh. She feels that power of that masculinity who now is attracted to her and is wooing her in essence, and now she feels this in her heart.
Speaker 1:This is that complementary move, very important though for a man to see this. This is why a man can get hooked on pornography much faster, because it's more about the body. A woman wants more to be loved, to be seen, and so this is what we're going into right now with the Song of Songs, putting in John Paul would say these archaic words, perhaps right, these are old words, you know, a thousand or two thousand years before Jesus came. This is Old Testament stuff, and so they're using words that they see around them in nature. They're shepherds. It's amazing power of this. So they're trying to put into words, to express what they're feeling in their hearts. It's the awe and wonder of walking into a love story.
Speaker 2:Okay, and that was just so important to bring up the heart, because the Pope says we need to see not just with the eyes but also with the heart.
Speaker 2:And when a woman is wanting love, she does want to be seen as beautiful, no doubt about it. Every woman, I believe, does want to be seen as beautiful. But she also wants to be seen her person, who she is, and that can only happen when the man sees her with the eyes of the heart, you know. So the body makes visible body and soul, and I think it's so important that for young men praise God if they look at a woman and say, wow, she is beautiful, and that's the initial attraction, visibly with his eyes. But if he doesn't get to know her who she is and see that inner beauty that she has, you know, the relationship is probably not going to work out very well. And so my call, kind of, is for all of us to understand and I think a woman, as you said, is more emotional that she begins functioning, seeing the person with her heart, probably more easily and maybe quicker, you know, and the visual is important as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're not exclusive right's, not exclusive it's not like a man doesn't want to get to know her, and it's not like a woman doesn't say, oh, that's a handsome guy. So yeah, there's. It's not one is exclusive, but just there's more. Uh, predominance in one for a man visual and it's important to know that.
Speaker 1:It's important for young people to know that, that a man is more visual because it helps a woman know how to dress. In other words, if a woman understands that a man is more visual and not just like them see, they think they're just like me so I can wear anything I want because he's gonna he's gonna feel this emotional pull to me. No, he's, he's got this image. So when he looks at you and all you're doing is showing your body parts, you become body parts to him and he's attracted to your body parts, not your wholeness.
Speaker 1:A woman dresses. You know, let's call it I hate to use the word more conservative, but you get the idea and is covering herself up to a certain extent. You could be very attractive.
Speaker 2:It's modesty.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look at Melania Trump, right, I mean the way she was dressed and you go whoa, that's a beautiful woman, right. So you're attracted to her. But it's much easier for a man then to see that and then be attracted and speak to her and speak to her heart. Versus Jeff Bezos' girl was more exposed right, and now you're looking at body parts and we saw that even happening, and commentators were making comments about that just yesterday. So this is timeless. What John Paul is talking about from the Song of Songs is timeless. So how did they get over this? Linda, we should read some of the words from the song in here. I know that if you look at number two, he's got the song. It's 411, is what he's looking at. You want me to read it? If you're not quite there yet, sure, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Not quite there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So number 411, listen to this. Your lips drip honey, my bride. So just again, they're using these words of nature and the words that are on their heart Sweet meats and milk are under your tongue and the fragrance of your garments is the fragrance of Lebanon. And so you get these fragrances and these adjectives, like your lips are dripping honey. You know this sweetness.
Speaker 1:So they're probably put into words, which is almost indescribable, right? Because this is a movement of love, a movement of the heart. How do I best do this? Right? So these are poetic words. And then he's going to do something, so he's attracted, and then he's going to say something that's very, very cool. And you are in a closed garden, my sister, my bride, in a closed garden, a fountain sealed. And then you go why does he call her Linda, my sister, my bride, and say you're in a closed garden, you're in a closed garden. What does that mean, right? What is he telling the bride there? So that's the bridegroom saying that to his bride. Right, you're in a closed garden, my sister, my bride, in a closed garden, a fountain sealed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's master of her mystery. I think Melania exuded that in the way she dressed, and not just her dress, but the way she would compose herself. Some of the other women too, ivanka, I think, and the vice president's wife, usha, I believe, is her name. You know, they all kind of exuded that mystery of feminism.
Speaker 2:And that's what is so attractive. Yeah, and back to our groom calling his bride my sister, my bride, in closed garden. You know, we talked a long time ago, jack, in the beginning, of Theology of the Body, that male and female. He created them, but we're one with the dignity in the image of God as humanity. And so male and female are the two different ways of being a person, and so there's that connection of all humanity which engenders the thought of sister and brother. And she looks at him and further on, she calls him brother as well, and it's this understanding that we are both human, where it's a different way of being a human person, and that's where that complementarity can come in, because if it was the same, we wouldn't have that. So I see that it's her mystery and her dignity that all comes under that calling of sister first, and then, as she is the particular person whom his heart has opened up to, she becomes bride.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then he says in there, you know, you're a fountain right, a fountain sealed, so, yeah, so, like you said, you know, she encloses not only the mystery of who she is as a person, but also this, this ability to be fertile, huh, to bring another into the world. I mean, it's a, it's a beautiful thing, you know, a fountain sealed. And this can't be rape, this can't be pushing, this cannot be pornography. You you, like you said, are are really in charge of your own body, huh, you're the master of your mystery. And so the man approaches, and it's a really cool place in here where she sees him starting to come forward, but he's still behind the lattice, as she says, and so he stays behind her, he's not pushing on her.
Speaker 1:This is such a beautiful thing because they're getting to know each other and, like you said, my sister, my bride, I call her sister first because we have a common heritage. We come from this, like you said, humanity, this is our human dignity, coming from one father, the father of all of us. And so I step into this family of love and I can see all of my brothers and sisters like this, and then, like you said, now we go into this dance where we want to come into the orbit, the milieu of another person. And when we do that, john Paul says we irradiate love. Right, this almost inconceivable awe and wonder of these two people in this dance. And here it's so important that he called their sister first, before the bride. So he's not pushing, he's getting to know her, he's getting to listen to her heart, he's looking into her eyes, he wants to know. You know, tell me about yourself.
Speaker 1:And that's where this dialogue from the Song of Songs starts. They start to speak to one another and it says here I have come to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gather my myrrh and my spices, I eat my honey and my sweetmeats, I drink my wine and my milk. And so now you can just see them coming deeper and into a relationship. It's so important to affect that friendship, like he calls her friend, and vice versa, brother and sister, to get to know one another, get to know what is on the other person's mind.
Speaker 1:Can you see the beauty of this friendship and then falling into this deep love? And then, oh my gosh, such a beautiful thing that we're skipping today. We never get to that point. People are married for four, five, six years and they get divorced because they never got to know one another. They just sexualized it right away. And John Paul would say later on in Love and Responsibility that if you sexualize it right away you actually sabotage this. So this is important to give your time to come into this incredible love story, to love as God loves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this song of songs has been called by some of those who have reviewed it an actual training in love, and you know it's terminology, it's poetry that perhaps seems a bit odd to us, but very old-fashioned in some ways. It comes from the world at the time of but it's not really unlike all the love songs that we have now that are truly love songs, not ones that have been sexualized but that are really speaking to this. You know, and I think there's more songs written about love than about any other topic. A long time ago, once I recall we were talking about this time ago, once I recall we were talking about this, and so there's so many ways that the heart tries to find the words to express what is being felt. I want to pull up something here, jack, because you talked about our heritage, and it's just a little footnote.
Speaker 2:In Christopher West's book, in his Theology the Body Explained, where he says and he's taking us back to audience 46, he says recall John Paul's statement that the heritage of our hearts is deeper than the sinfulness inherited, and the good news is that Christ came to reactivate that deeper inheritance and give it real power in human life. So all those masters of suspicion out there, as we're talking about love in this term and saying come on, you know? No, it's very true that that heritage goes that deep if you allow it to open up in your heart. But you have to let Christ in to do that, you see, and then the full beauty of what is being expressed in the Song of Songs is available to all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's important. I'm going to pick up what you said there and I'm going to read something first and then relate a story in my own life, and this is from Chapter 8, the final chapter of the Song of Songs, and his left hand is under my head and his right arm embraces me, and then he, basically, he says to her, he does say to her do not arouse, do not stir up love before its own time. I mean, how powerful is that? This is what we're talking about. Don't stir, don't get too far ahead of time. Until we're really deep into this, getting to know one another, we want to make sure. So then it's true love. Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm, for, stern as death is love, relentless as the netherworld is devotion, its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away. Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love, he would be roundly mocked. It's not something you can buy, it's something that, that, that that's there from god. God is, god is love. And now we're created in the imago day, we're expressing love, something new, that what didn't exist before. This man and a woman met each other, and now you have this new love, and then chastity and its welcome. Our sister is little and she has no breasts of yet. This is that early stage of this relationship. And what shall we do for our sister when her courtship begins? If she is a wall, we will build upon it a silver parapet. If she is a door, we will reinforce it with cedar plank. I am a wall, and now she's getting a little older. Right Now she's getting ready. I'm a wall and my breasts are like towers, and so now, in the eyes, I have become one to be welcomed. I'm growing up. Huh, I'm grinning, ready for love, I'm there, and so it's powerful, it's beautiful.
Speaker 1:When I was struggling in my marriage, I read this through John Paul's work and I woke up one day and my wife and I were really struggling and I looked at her as a little girl, just exactly like this, and I pictured her in my mind as a little girl and I knew that she had gone through some hardships growing up too, and she had. You know, let me just leave it like that and I saw her as a little girl being hurt and in my mind I go oh my gosh, I'm just another man hurting her now. Now she's got older and I saw her that way and I started to approach her as a sister again and say you know what? This is what John Paul would call non-interested love, not that I'm not interested in her, but not interested in getting anything back. In other words, I'm trying to be nice, to have sex or whatever. No, I'm just going to see her, this little girl, and just talk to her like a sister.
Speaker 1:And I started to do that, linda. I started to put my phone down, we started to talk, I started to ask her questions about herself, like what were you thinking today? Little things. And she started to talk more and more and more and more, and over time the dam broke. And till today, many, many years later, it's the first thing in the morning she starts talking. And I'm reminded she's very talkative in the morning, which is nice really. I mean, she's happy, she wakes up happy and she's talking. And I used to just go oh, my gosh, would you just be quiet, give me a couple of minutes. Well, I'm an early riser, so I'm up before her anyways. So once she starts talking, I just let her go now and I just enjoy it.
Speaker 1:And this has been going on for many, many years and again it's from reading this you think, okay, well, she's this little girl Now she's grown. Well, I use her to be that little girl. She has a great sense of humor. That came from her childhood. I almost took all that away from her, linda, I mean, I was the jerk. I was really a jerk in some ways. Right that, you know, I was working hard and different things. I just don't want to hear all that stuff. And then I realized, no, that's who she is. Let her express who she is, not who I think she is or not what I tell her she should be.
Speaker 1:Let her be her, and it was amazing how she began to flower and and then I would see that and her joy gave me joy, because I didn't have to do much to to to, just I had to just be an open ear, right sometimes to let her speak. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What a beautiful story. What a moment of singular actual grace you were granted when you had that wonderful insight when that all started. It's just beautiful. What you read set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm. Well, in my Bible I have the Catholic Study Bible. There's a heading that calls it true love right.
Speaker 1:I had that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So here we are. I'm thinking okay, in long-term marriages, this describes what you have to do if you have even a chance of that marriage staying together. It's just so beautiful, for stern as death is love. Your parents exude that as well. I mean, you said your dad is 99 now and your mom, I mean we see older couples who have understood this, grasped it and then have been living it and, as we know, as we get older, the sexuality part of it fades, because it has to. That's the way of life and that's God's plan as a part of it. But you know, listening to your wife speak, now, I too had a troubled childhood in some ways, and when I first met Mike and what we did was talk, now, we had that experience very early on.
Speaker 2:By the grace of God, he listened and I talked and I talked and eventually I got deep into what my experience was and where I was at in the moment of what I believed about love, or whether I mentioned not true love doesn't really exist, kind of thing, and he too, you know, was able to bring out from me or help me heal in a way, just by his listening. So, young men, you know what can I say to them right now If you are starting a relationship with someone you're attracted to, that might be a pointer. Right Is listen to her, listen to what she has to say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's important. I mean, it's so important for both sides to hear this, because what'll happen now, when I'm talking to young men even if a young man grasps this, linda, sometimes the, the women don't, and they also grew up in this pornographic culture and they, they have been told to reduce this authentic love that we're talking about, this potential for for love, to a feeling you you know, just like this heart feeling. They want to be filled, but then they sexualize it and they're told that this is the way they're going to find it. So, unfortunately, even for young men who are trying to go deeper into a relationship, sometimes the women are very aggressive today, and so we really have a lot of work to do to get this message out so that they both don't sabotage their chances for love.
Speaker 1:You know, we have to work past this sexuality and realize that sexuality, as we've described in many of these sessions previous to this one, linda, as a sacramental sign that seals this, seals this, that marital union, marital embrace, marital sexual union, when the two become one, open to like. This is the sacramental sign. This is the sign that says I'm here, I've decided now, and you've decided, to renew our wedding vows, to be able to say I came here freely, totally faithfully and fruitfully, forever to you. That're in a love story, that that we're going to take to our deaths, and that's a big deal, and that's what our sexuality says, you know, when the two become one, jesus says let no man separate. You know that that god, what, who god has brought together, that's the sacramental sign, and so this is an important thing and we're missing this whole thing.
Speaker 2:That's the seal set on your heart. Those vows is what sets that seal. It's so important that we understand that. One of the theologians speaking on Song of Songs made a statement that I think is important. He says that it needs to be understood as both sexual and sacred and that the two must be held together. If you just focus on the sexual, then it's just erotic poetry, that that's all it is. And if you focus too much on the sacred element that is in there, we risk having it be too allegorical to just push the sex away, repress it. And he said, neither one will work to really understand that it's that sexuality and that sacredness together which is what marriage and the two become one is all about right.
Speaker 2:The sexual and the sacred.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you have to be able to acknowledge that, because this is what we started out with, this odd wonder of of the pull of femininity to masculinity and vice versa. This is a powerful movement. If I'm going to pretend like that doesn't exist, I've taken away so much. Just reality. This is a major pull because this has given us a little tiny taste in this relationship between a man and a woman.
Speaker 1:Think about this, Linda. As powerful as that is, it's a little tiny taste of the intimacy God seeks with us. This is Jesus on the cross. This is my body given for you. This is how far God will go to reach into my heart to woo me, to be able to pour himself into me or into you or into anybody listening today. And so this is God's design and he wants it to be. I mean marital union, sexual union, especially when you think about those early years. I mean this is a powerful thing. That happens, Of course. Then, open to life, Life started to come pretty fast for us and one child after another started to come, and it was a beautiful, powerful, sacramental and exhausting first 15, 20 years, with all the kids and different things.
Speaker 2:But that's the purpose and meaning, Jack. The family is the cell of society. God designed it that way, and so it must be that there's more meaning to it than the physical pleasure of it all by itself, as it has been totally devolved and degraded into pornography and one-night stands. That isn't love, that isn't part of the plan, and it's why you feel so alone, lost and bewildered, because that's not what God had planned for us.
Speaker 1:Well, I've been married a long time, and so have you, and then all these years, I mean 99.999% of the time we're married we're not having sex. So you know, if you think that this is a pornographic, you know thing, when you get married you're going to be very disappointed because there's going to be a lot of times, like you said, with a child, with people busy, maybe sick. I mean, there's a million things that are going to happen in life and it better become love. Right, like the rivers cannot take away, huh, that the waters cannot drown, and this is a deep love, this is what we're called to be. So, hey, god bless you, linda. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks, linda, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks everybody, thanks for joining us. Any last thought there, linda, was on your mind before I let you go.
Speaker 2:Just your statement there that you know, as you're looking in long term, all of those times when it is not about your sexual intimacy are those opportunities to be gift of self and to grow in God's love.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you'd be surprised if you open up all those great desires of the human heart to God himself. This is how you know that the power of Jesus Christ to fill you, because those times that get hard and self-sacrificial and you get down on your knees and you open that up to Christ and to God, the Trinity himself, and he will come in and fill you, and then this is what you take into your relationship. You don't realize it, you don't understand it until you try it, until you step into the arena and you do it, and then in that you find the beauty that you expressed just a little while ago, the beauty and power of femininity and masculinity and the power of the sacred coming together and then opening up to a Trinitarian love which fills this whole thing. So it's a powerful thing, it's beautiful. All right, linda, thank you so much. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1:Talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.